WILLIAM LAW AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE WILL WILLIAM LAW was born at King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, in 1686, and he died at the same place in 1761. Daniel Defoe was born in 1661, Jonathan Swift in 1667, Joseph Addison in 1672, Alexander Pope in 1688, Joseph Butler in 1692, John Wesley in 1703, Samuel Johnson in 1709, and Oliver Goldsmith in 1728. The best books of Law's famous contemporaries are all more or less known to every one who loves books,-Crusoe and Gulliver, Homer and the Essay on Man, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Vicar of Wakefield, the Analogy and the Sermons, as well as Southey and Boswell, but many not ill-read men have never read a single line of William Law. And yet it may with perfect safety be said that there are very few authors in English literature, if there is one, whose works will better delight and reward readers of an original and serious cast of mind than just the wholly forgotten works of William Law. In sheer intellectual strength Law is fully abreast of the very foremost of his illustrious contemporaries, while in that fertilising touch which is the true test of genius, Law simply stands alone. And then his truly great and sanctified intellect worked exclusively, intensely, and with unparalleled originality on the most interesting, the most important, and the most productive of all subjects, the Divine nature and human nature, sin, prayer, love, and eternal life. Certainly fame is like a river that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid. b BIRTH AND William Law was the fourth of a large family of eight sons and COLLEGE DAYS three daughters. His father was a shopkeeper in King's Cliffe, and the shop had prospered in his honest and attentive hands. The old shopkeeper's impressive portrait has been preserved to us in the delightful gallery of his son's Serious Call. He was surely a happy son who could draw such a portrait of his father as we have in the Paternus of that noble book and could also place beside it such a companion picture as that of Eusebia in her widowhood. Young Law was intended for the ministry of the Church of England, and with that view he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1705. He was elected to a Fellowship and entered Holy Orders in 1711. He held his Fellowship till 1716, when by his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to King George 1., Law forfeited his Fellowship and with it all hope of preferment in the Established Church. I suppose every student lays down rules for his life when he first leaves his father's house and enters the university, and much more when he enters the divinity hall; and the only thing remarkable about the rules that Law laid down for his conduct as a student is the light they cast on the early life of the future author of the Christian Perfection and the Serious Call. Out of Law's eighteen rules I select the following as specimens. 'That the greatness of human nature consists in nothing else but in imitating the Divine nature. To avoid all idleness. To avoid all excess in eating and drinking. To call to mind the presence of God whenever I find myself under any temptation to sin, and to have immediate recourse to prayer. To think humbly of myself and to think with great charity of all others. To forbear all evilspeaking. To pray privately three times a day besides my morning and evening devotions. To spend some time in giving an account of the day, previous to evening prayer.' To the students of William Law's works all these rules and resolutions read like so many headings of well-known chapters and recall many never-tobe-forgotten passages. The letter which the young nonjuror wrote to his eldest brother when he lost his Fellowship, and with it all the high hopes his family had hitherto held of his advancement in the Church, lets us see what kind of man the observance of his rules of conduct had produced in William Law. 'Dear Brother,' he wrote, 'I have sent my mother such news as I am afraid she While yet a young man, Law sprang to the front rank of the as a contropolemical writers of his day. The Bangorian controversy created VERSIALIST a tremendous uproar in the Church of England in Law's early days. We have ourselves passed through insane enough panics to have some idea of the Bangorian controversy. Dr. Hoadly, Bishop AGAINST of Bangor, occupied, roughly speaking, some such position theolo- HOADLY gically and ecclesiastically in his day as that which Bishop Hampden, Archbishop Whately, Dean Stanley, and Dr. Hatch occupied in the Church of England in their day. The memorable sermon that Bishop Hoadly preached before George 1. in 1717, and which caused such a scandal, was just such a sermon as Dean Stanley, say, might have preached in his day, and, indeed, did often preach. And it will give modern students not a bad idea of Law's reply to Hoadly if they will imagine Canon Mozley replying in a pamphlet to Dean Stanley's Church Institutions. Mozley at his best is not unlike Law if only he had a dash of Newman to give lucidity, keenness, flexibility, and here and there a subtle touch of wit and satire to his style. The High Church party of that day were soon in ecstasies over the advent of such a powerful writer on their side. And I do not wonder at their exhilaration. For, little sympathy as I have with many of Law's early ecclesiastical contentions,as little as he latterly had himself,-yet I cannot but confess to the strength of understanding, the ripeness of learning, the clearness of eye, and, withal, the noble seriousness of mind that Law discovers to his readers on his first appearance in the arena of theological controversy. Throughout his three letters to Hoadly, Law is almost wholly taken up with the divine right of kings and priests, the apostolical succession of English bishops, baptismal regeneration, confirmation, absolution, and suchlike questions. There are not lacking, indeed, many promises and foretastes of that truly catholic breadth and depth of mind, and that truly apostolic power of handling divine things, which afterwards made William Law so deservedly famous. But had he not in after days far outgrown the Bangorian stage of his mental and spiritual development, Law would have been hailed as the ablest and freshest polemical writer of his own day, but would never have been opened after his own day had passed away. No one can read Law's Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor without admiring and enjoying the young nonjuror's ecclesiastical gladiatorship, but it is when he rises into such passages as those on prayer, on the use of the passions in religion, and suchlike, that we hail the approach of the coming author of the Christian Perfection, the Serious Call, and The Spirit of Love. In their purely theological passages Law's Three Letters continually remind me of Hooker at his best. It is the fashion to laugh at Christopher Walton as a perfect madcap on the subject of William Law and all that he ever said and did, but I have found nothing that to my mind better sums up the true merit of Law in the part he took in the Bangorian controversy than ust what Walton says on this subject in his mammoth footnote. 'If the reader,' says Walton, 'be a person of experience, strict impartiality, and solid judgment in religious things, he will easily arrive at a clear perception of the true and the false of all the questions discussed in this most important controversy. For our author, despite his captivating logic, rhetoric, and erudition, and notwithstanding the praise bestowed upon those letters hy the High Church party and their reviewers, must not be sanctioned |